Nikhyl Singhal advises folks at every end of the startup spectrum, from scrappy early-stage founders to heads of product at some of the biggest unicorns. Founders and product leaders at companies big and small bring him their toughest questions: When should founders hand over the product controls? What should you look for in a PM? How do you structure the team? How do you balance strategy and innovation with execution and predictability?
Underneath each of these issues are minefields that could trigger any number of missteps. That’s why Singhal always finds himself dishing out the same piece of advice: You need to craft a product team to match the phase of your company. In other words, from the early struggles of finding product/market fit and hiring your first PM, to the “teenage years” of optimizing products in the messy middle and growing to a 10-person product org, to the blistering pace of hypergrowth, every phase of a startup’s life brings a unique set of challenges for the product org.
To help founders and product leaders get a better sense of those challenges — and the team they’ll need in place to solve them — Singhal shares the phases he believes a product org goes through as a startup matures.
Author: Nikhyl Singhal
Source: First Round Review
Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management
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